Jon Clay

When Jon Clay bought Strong Incentive for his Alpha Delta Stables for $2.15 million at last year's Fasig-Tipton November Sale, she had already produced Grade III winner and track-record holder Highly Motivated (Into Mischief), now a stallion at Airdrie Stud; two-time Grade III winner Surge Capacity (Flintshire {GB}); and an up-and-coming `TDN Rising Star' named Ways and Means (Practical Joke), who had run second in the Grade I Spinaway Stakes. Within a month of his purchase, Surge Capacity won the Grade I Matriarch, and by the following summer, Ways and...

When Jon Clay first got started in the Thoroughbred business, he launched Alpha Delta Stables with ambitious goals in mind. Step one: breed a stakes winner. Step two: breed something good enough to make it to either the Kentucky Derby or the Kentucky Oaks. Nearly two decades later, Clay has checked off every one of those goals, having bred both a Derby and an Oaks starter. Plus, his program has produced something he never could have dreamed up back when he was compiling that wish list of accomplishments. In world-class...

"To be in the horseracing business, I think you need a lot of patience," says Jon Clay. "With horses that don't sell, even horses that get injured, I've learned to be patient; learned not to get too emotional." Easier said than done, naturally. But here's a guy who absolutely gets it; who understands that the reckoning is not rendered in consistent, cogent cycles of dollars and cents, but in a longer, wider register of satisfaction. Yes, Clay is a commercial breeder and strives to make his program pay. He has...